AUSOUG Perth 2010 – Day 2

First off the mark this morning was Mark Lancaster on “Building Advanced APEX 4.0 UIs with Ext JS”, which was an eye-popping demo of some wonderful things you can do when you combine the power of Ext JS with Apex.

Tom Kyte presented via Webinar his “The Best Way – Things You Know” presentation, which I had already enjoyed in Melbourne but it’s always worth revisiting these things – helps to counter the constant wave of opposite sentiment from the other side of the spectrum.

Some years ago I had a quick look at REST, as an alternative to SOAP – but never really got the hang of it. So I was interested in being introduced properly by Chris Muir in his talk “A Change is as Good as a REST – JDeveloper 11g’s REST Web Services”. This double-length presentation was worth attending, he started with an excellent definition of web services, their history and REST’s heritage; explained the power and simplicity of REST, compared and contrasted it with its complex and comprehensive cousin, SOAP; and demonstrated how easy it is to create and expose simple REST web services using JDeveloper.

After lunch, we were entertained by Guy Harrison‘s keynote address, “Technology Trends that have the potential to make big impacts both in our everyday life and as Oracle professionals”. They had to close down all the other conference rooms just to make room for the presentation title in the programme :) But it was a fun talk speculating about the kinds of technology our kids and our kids’ kids will probably be all blasé about.

Connor McDonald fired us all up with “A Better Way of Managing Optimizer Statistics”. He claims that we should stop collecting statistics and stop creating histograms :) – I suspect a number of DBAs are now wondering why they wasted so much of their time (and so much server time) for so long…

I finished the day with Frank Bommarito‘s “Outlines, Profiles, and SQL Plan Baselines” which was a good introduction to the subject and for me was a good overview of some new features I haven’t used.